WORKDAY

Dave Duffield founded PeopleSoft in 1987 and built it into one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world. In 2004, Oracle launched a hostile takeover.

Despite Duffield’s fierce resistance, Oracle won. Duffield was out.

So he started again. In 2005, at age 64, he co-founded Workday with Aneel Bhusri.

The thesis: enterprise HR and finance software was moving to the cloud, and PeopleSoft’s on-premise architecture was a dinosaur. Workday would be the cloud-native replacement.

Workday sells cloud-based enterprise software for human capital management (HCM) and financial management. Large companies pay annual subscription fees typically running into the millions.

Revenue exceeds $7 billion annually.

The subscription model provides predictable, recurring revenue. Professional services for implementation add additional revenue.

Customer retention rates are above 95%.

Workday Human Capital Management — the core HR platform for workforce planning, recruiting, talent management, and payroll. Workday Financial Management — enterprise finance, accounting, and procurement.

Workday Adaptive Planning — financial planning and analysis. Workday Extend — platform for building custom applications.

Workday grew by targeting the largest enterprises first — companies that were fed up with Oracle and SAP’s clunky on-premise software. They offered a genuinely better product with a modern cloud interface.

Word of mouth among HR leaders drove adoption. The company went public in 2012 at a $9.5 billion valuation.

Oracle and SAP aren’t going away. Both have launched their own cloud products and are fighting hard to keep enterprise customers from switching.

Workday also faces increasing competition from companies like ServiceNow expanding into HR. The implementation cost and complexity of switching enterprise HR systems means sales cycles are long and expensive.

Before going public, Workday was backed by Greylock Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Duffield’s own fortune, and others. The IPO in 2012 raised $637 million.

The company is now publicly traded on NASDAQ as WDAY.